UCL News

Services

Get updates from UCL News

First micro-structure atlas of the human brain completed

19 October 2012

A European team of scientists
have built the first atlas of white-matter microstructure in the human brain.
The project’s final results have the potential to change the face of
neuroscience and medicine over the coming decade.

The work relied on
groundbreaking MRI technology and was funded by the EU’s future and emerging
technologies program with a grant of 2.4 million Euros. The participants of the
project, called CONNECT, were drawn from leading research centres in countries
across Europe including Israel,
United Kingdom, Germany, France,
Denmark, Switzerland and Italy.

The project investigators met
today in Paris,
after 3 years of research, to announce the conclusion of the project and
present a report of their findings.

The
new atlas combines three-dimensional images from the MRI scans of 100 brains of
volunteers. To achieve this, CONNECT developed advanced MRI methods providing
unprecedented detail and accuracy.

The UCL team use the latest computer modelling algorithms and hardware to invent new imaging techniques. The techniques we devised were key to realising the new CONNECT brain atlas.

Professor Daniel Alexander, UCL Computer Science

Professor Daniel
Alexander, a CONNECT steering committee member from the UCL Department of
Computer Science said: "The UCL team use the latest computer modelling
algorithms and hardware to invent new imaging techniques. The techniques we
devised were key to realising the new CONNECT brain atlas. “The imaging
techniques reveal new information about brain structure that help us understand
how low-level cellular architecture relate to high-level thought
processes.”

Currently,
biomedical research teams around the world studying brain science rely on a
brain atlas produced by painstaking and destructive histological methods on the
brains of a few individuals who donated their bodies to science.

The
new atlas simulates the impossible process of painstakingly examining every mm2
of brain tissue (of which there are around 100 million per brain) with a
microscope, while leaving the brain in tact.

The
key novelty in the atlas is the mapping of microscopic features (such as
average cell size and packing density) within the white matter, which contains
the neuronal fibres that transmit information around the living brain. The
results of the project, obtained through advanced image processing techniques,
provide new depth and accuracy in our understanding of the human brain in
health and disease.

The
atlas describes the brain's microstructure in standardized space, which enables
non-expert users, such as physicians or medical researchers, to exploit the
wealth of knowledge it contains. The atlas contains a variety of new images
that represent different microscopic tissue characteristics, such as the fibre diameter and fibre density across the brain, all estimated using MRI. These
images will serve as the reference standard of future brain studies in both
medicine and basic neuroscience.

The
project will dramatically facilitate and promote future research into white
matter structure and function. Historically in
neuroscience, the vast majority of research effort has been invested in
understanding and studying gray matter and neurons, while white matter has
received relatively little attention.

This
owes largely to the lack of effective research tools to study white matter,
even though it comprises about half the volume of the brain. The new MRI
methods that were developed in CONNECT allow researchers, for the first time,
to visualize the micro-structure of the living brain over the whole brain.

This
opens new realms in our understanding of our most complex organ. In the future,
the project members intend to use the technology they have developed to study
the dynamics and time dependence of the micro-structure in white matter. For
example they will search for a finger print or a trace that a cognitive task
imprints on white matter microstructure encoding new experiences in the wiring
of the brain.

Another
future direction is to characterize and understand micro-structural changes
caused by different neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's or
schizophrenia, in order to develop better diagnostic procedures for these and
other devastating conditions.